The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [11]
We spent the days drinking mushroom tea, tripping, wandering the beach; hustler dudes came up to the three girls and me, singsonging to me in gorgeous Jamaican accents, “You have t’ree! Give me one!”
Negril ran on two grey economies; one involved selling stuff on the beach to people who were too high to protest. They’d grab you by the arm and pull you towards their little stand selling shell necklaces. Fat ladies on the beach would grab the hair of passing white girls, starting to braid Bo Derek braids without a prompt. If the girl tried to pull away, they’d cry something like, “You have no respect for the Jamaican people!” There were a lot of white girls wandering around the beach with Bo Derek braids.
Dudes with intense gazes would block your path as you were strolling and say, “I come from the hills. I got the good bud.” The weed was generally terrible—dry, yellow, and stemmy. We smoked a lot of it anyway, rolling massive spliffs of shitty pot that we told ourselves was the world’s greatest, we’re in Jamaica, right?
The other industry was kids who came down from the hills to fuck middle-aged tourist women. The women rented them scooters and bought them clothes. These were less pure sexual transactions than sham romances; you’d see a flabby German tourist walking hand in hand with some washboard-abbed, nineteen-year-old guy pretending to be a Rastafarian. How desperately did they need this, that they’d buy into the fantasy?
(Years later, I came back with my friend Sally. We told everybody we were brother and sister, despite the fact that we looked nothing alike, so she could fuck Jamaican dudes without suffering questions. She charged everything to an American Express card that her mom had gotten her strictly for emergencies. Every morning at 7 AM a girl claiming to be the sister of the fake-Rasta she was sleeping with—and renting a scooter for—would knock on the door, claim that she worked at the place they ate at the other night, and will you please sign this AmEx slip again, I messed it up again, please sign the slip again or I’ll lose my job? Blearily, Sally always signed. She discovered a month later, when she got the bill, she’d been taken for five grand.)
I had gotten a job driving an ice cream truck. It started on Monday, so I came back a Sunday earlier than the three girls. I decided to smuggle some of this terrible weed back in my sock.
At JFK, we deplaned into a hallway. The cops told us to stand single file. A flight from Lithuania landed right behind us, and its passengers ambled down towards customs unmolested. In the furthest reaches of this endless corridor, a door opened, and a cop with a tiny dog came out. The panting terrier scuttled down the line, stretching the leash to its utmost. The dog passed me. Stopped a few feet behind me. It barked.
“Good boy!” said the cop.
The terrier bounded a few yards ahead of me and barked again.
“Good boy!” said the cop.
They let us through. I was almost tearful with gratitude. I went to pick up my guitar at baggage claim and went up to a cop to ask where the luggage for the Air Jamaica flight was.
The cop was leaning against a wall. When I said, “Excuse me,” he straightened up with a start. He pointed towards a carousel, looking me directly in the eyes.
I was chatting with a middle-aged lady about where I went to school when a fat guy in a black t-shirt, flanked by uniformed cops, walked up to me holding a badge. They took me into a side room.
Good vacation tale for that tourist lady, I thought. The teenager she was chatting with turned out to be a drug smuggler.
I envisioned myself getting raped